Can a video game encourage kids to read the classics?

Ever since tiny Game Boy consoles began colonizing students' backpacks in the 1990s, most teachers have viewed video games as the enemy of schoolwork, games as the opposite of books. That may well change next year as a New York-based education start-up rolls out the first of more than 1,000 book titles, most of them classics, with video gaming at the heart of the reading enterprise.

Amplify, whose school-oriented tablet computer began shipping this month, on Tuesday announced its lineup of games for the devices. It's also planning to release a list of game-development studios helping develop its games.

Foremost among the new titles: Lexica, a massive role-playing game for young teens that invites them to interact with characters from great novels and read the books outside of class if they want to get ahead in the game.

Game designer Jesse Schell, who led development, says Lexica is trying to "inspire kids to pursue reading on their own and simultaneously to get them familiar with characters from classical literature."

Part of a suite of language arts and math games to be introduced today at the annual Games For Change festival in New York, Lexica is built around an imaginary secret library that contains every book ever written. Special guardians are the library's keepers, but a few of them believe that in order to keep the books safe, they must be kept away from everyone. Since no one is reading the books, the characters' lives are threatened, so they begin climbing out of the books to get help.

"If you really care about the game, you're going to read the book," says Schell. "The game gives you a powerful reason to read the books."

In a way, Schell says, Lexica presents reading and writing as a subversive activity.

"The Evil Empire, as it were, believes that you're not smart enough and you're not good enough," he says. "You're certainly not good enough to write something yourself, because only great writers can be the ones who create books. And, in fact, you probably shouldn't even be reading these things, because you're not smart enough."

Based on the motivational theories of Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, the game encourages students to assess themselves not on how smart or talented they are, but on how hard they work. And the reward for completing quests with characters is significant: Help the Cheshire cat from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and he'll help you turn invisible so you can sneak through the virtual world a la Harry Potter and his invisibility cloak. "The more characters from literature you get to know, the more powerful you become," says Schell.

To build realistic interactions with all those characters, developers have hired an army of writers with "deeply literary sensibilities," says Justin Leites, Amplify's vice president of games. Among them: novelist Matthue Roth, author of the new animated book My First Kafka, which adapts three Kafka stories for children.

A division of News Corp., Amplify debuted its Android-powered tablet last March at the SXSWedu conference in Austin. Sold only to schools at the moment, it costs $299 for a Wi-Fi-only model or $349 for a 4G model. Each device requires a two-year service and materials bundle, which will run $99 a year for the Wi-Fi tablet or $179-a-year for the 4G model.

Amplify's long-term goal for Lexica is to get students to play the game throughout the school year, starting in seventh grade and continuing through ninth grade. With new episodes and quests tied to the school calendar, its hope is to create "viral excitement" in schools as students unlock new episodes. Lexica will ship next in the fall of 2014 with at least 350 book titles. Developers hope eventually to include 1,200. Mindful of the ways in which school can spoil the magic of both games and reading, they're actually discouraging teachers from assigning the game — or the books — directly.

"We're not designing homework here," says Amplify CEO Joel Klein, a former New York City Schools chancellor. "These games will improve learning not because kids have to play them for school, but because they want to play them in their own free time."

That's key, says Schell, who also teaches game design at Carnegie Mellon University. "At all times it's really trying not to push stuff down your throat," he says. "We never have a situation where we say, 'You have to go read this book in order to continue.' It's much more about helping you find the books that you're excited about, that you're interested in, and making you familiar with some of the books that kids in that age bracket are likely to be excited about."

Lexica is also decidedly not a way to avoid reading a class assignment, says Leites. "Playing the game doesn't serve as a kind of Cliffs Notes. It kind of works the reverse way: If you know about the book, it helps you in the game. But playing the game wouldn't be a substitute for reading the book."

He adds, "The main educational goal is to get kids to be doing more reading of an ambitious sort outside the classroom. Kids today probably read more words than ever before, but they're tweets or text messages from each other. This is to try to get them to do something which they're not doing as part of their daily habits, which is reading books of a reasonably ambitious sort."